Moving Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: …users.nber.org/~kling/mto_ajs2.pdf1154 AJS Volume 116 Number 4 ... Moving Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: How Girls Fare

1154 AJS Volume 116 Number 4 (January 2011): 1154–89

� 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0002-9602/2011/11604-0003$10.00

Moving Teenagers Out of High-RiskNeighborhoods: How Girls Fare Better thanBoys1

Susan Clampet-LundquistSt. Joseph’s University

Kathryn EdinHarvard University

Jeffrey R. KlingU.S. Congressional Budget Office

Greg J. DuncanUniversity of California,Irvine

Moving to Opportunity (MTO) offered public housing residents theopportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Several yearslater, boys in the experimental group fared no better on measures ofrisk behavior than their control group counterparts, whereas girls inthe experimental group engaged in lower-risk behavior than controlgroup girls. The authors explore these differences by analyzing datafrom in-depth interviews conducted with 86 teens in Baltimore andChicago. They find that daily routines, fitting in with neighborhoodnorms, neighborhood navigation strategies, interactions with peers,friendship making, and distance from father figures may contributeto how girls who moved via MTO benefited more than boys.

INTRODUCTION

Young people who grow up in high-poverty urban neighborhoods expe-rience crime and violence, resource-poor schools, restricted labor markets,

1 Primary support for this research was provided by grants from the Russell SageFoundation and the William T. Grant Foundation. The views expressed in this articleare those of the authors and should not be interpreted as those of the CongressionalBudget Office. We are grateful to Todd Richardson and Mark Shroder of the De-partment of Housing and Urban Development; to Eric Beecroft, Judie Feins, BarbaraGoodson, Robin Jacob, Stephen Kennedy, Larry Orr, and Rhiannon Patterson of AbtAssociates; to our collaborators Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Lawrence Katz, Tama Leven-thal, Jeffrey Liebman, Jens Ludwig, and Lisa Sanbonmatsu; and to staff members of

Moving Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods

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and other forms of deprivation at a much higher level than those whoare raised in middle-income or affluent neighborhoods. In addition toindividual and family characteristics, these neighborhood contexts canplace teens at risk. Numerous studies have documented a correlationbetween socioeconomic neighborhood-level variables and adolescent sex-ual behaviors (Hogan and Kitagawa 1985; Crane 1991; Billy and Moore1992; Coulton and Pandey 1992; Brewster, Billy, and Grady 1993; Brooks-Gunn et al. 1993; Ku, Sonenstein, and Pleck 1993; Billy, Brewster, andGrady 1994), the home environment (Klebanov, Brooks-Gunn, and Dun-can 1994), child maltreatment (Coulton et al. 1995), crime (Sampson andGroves 1989), dropping out of school (Crane 1991; Coulton and Pandey1992; Brooks-Gunn et al. 1993), and delinquent and risk behavior (John-stone 1978; Kowaleski-Jones 2000; Wikstrom and Loeber 2000). Childrenwho grow up in public housing developments may be at particular riskfor these adverse outcomes, since families who live in public housing aretypically in neighborhoods with higher poverty than families who aresimilarly poor but have no housing subsidy (Newman and Schnare 1997).

Beginning in 1994, a large federally operated housing mobility dem-onstration, Moving to Opportunity (MTO), used a special Section 8voucher to help relocate a randomly selected group of program applicantsliving in highly distressed public housing projects in five U.S. cities intocommunities in which fewer than 10% of their neighbors were poor.2 Over4,000 families signed up for the program, and roughly one-third receiveda voucher to relocate to a low-poverty neighborhood. Several years afterrandom assignment, survey data showed that teen girls appeared to benefitmore from the treatment than teen boys (Kling, Liebman, and Katz 2007).We use in-depth interviews with a subset of MTO teens in Baltimore andChicago to explore how boys may have been less able to take advantageof this type of housing mobility policy than girls. We find six underlyingfactors that may contribute to the differences in outcomes for boys andgirls: daily routines, fitting in with neighborhood norms, neighborhoodnavigation strategies, interactions with neighborhood peers, delinquencyamong friends, and involvement with father figures.

the Moving to Opportunity Qualitative Study Project. Direct correspondence to SusanClampet-Lundquist, Department of Sociology, St. Joseph University, 5600 City Avenue,Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19131. E-mail: [email protected] Public housing developments provide units to income-eligible families in a devel-opment managed by the local housing authority. Section 8 (also called Housing Choice)vouchers are used by income-eligible families to rent a unit in the private housingmarket.

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POLICY BACKGROUND

If neighborhood context matters, as sociologists have argued since thebeginning of the Chicago school, then what happens when a programoffers families from a poor neighborhood—in this case a highly distressedpublic housing development—the opportunity to move to a more affluentneighborhood? This is essentially what the MTO demonstration examines.MTO was inspired in part by the apparent success of the Gautreauxhousing mobility program launched in Chicago two decades earlier (seeRubinowitz and Rosenbaum [2000] for a detailed history of this program).Created by a court-ordered legal settlement to redress past racial discrim-ination in the location of public housing, a key part of Gautreaux wasproviding African-American families with a voucher to move to largelywhite, suburban neighborhoods. Between 1976 and 1998, the Gautreauxprogram moved over 7,000 low-income families into subsidized privatehousing in the city and its suburbs (Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000).Gautreaux suburban movers relocated to places that were predominantlymiddle class and nearly all white. Gautreaux applicants moving withinthe Chicago city limits leased apartments in a diverse range of neigh-borhoods, some affluent and predominantly white but some poorer andlargely African-American.

Seven to eight years after relocation, a survey of Gautreaux participantsfound that teenagers who remained in the city were four times more likelyto have dropped out of high school than those who moved to the suburbs.Those who made a suburban move when they were 10 and older weremore than twice as likely to enroll in college and had almost double theemployment rate of those who remained in the city (Rubinowitz andRosenbaum 2000). Mortality rates were substantially lower among maleyouths in Gautreaux families who had relocated an average of eight yearsearlier to census tracts with higher fractions of residents with collegedegrees, which suggests that relocating to more advantaged neighbor-hoods can ameliorate the mortality risks faced by this population (Votrubaand Kling 2009). A longer-run examination of the fates of Gautreauxmovers based on administrative data found that both mothers and theirnow-grown children continued to live in neighborhoods that were everybit as prosperous as their placement neighborhoods, albeit with a higherpercentage of African-Americans, but no city/suburban differences in em-ployment were found (Deluca et al. 2010). Nonetheless, Gautreaux’s ap-parent success has been a driving force behind other mobility initiativeslike MTO.

MTO incorporates some but not all elements of Gautreaux. Like manyof the Gautreaux households, low-income residents in public housing lo-cated in extremely poor neighborhoods voluntarily applied to participate


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in MTO (MTO sites included Chicago but also Baltimore, Boston, LosAngeles, and New York). MTO participants in Baltimore and Chicagowere almost all African-American, like Gautreaux participants. Neigh-borhood racial composition was a criterion for Gautreaux placements,whereas MTO used tract-level poverty rates to define eligible neighbor-hoods.3 Furthermore, the Gautreaux program was a court-ordered remedyto discriminatory practices on the part of Chicago’s public housing au-thority, whereas MTO was designed as an experiment.4

MTO offered the experimental group housing counseling and a specialvoucher that could be used only in census tracts with 1990 poverty ratesof less than 10%. A second treatment group—one that will not be con-sidered here—received a regular Section 8 voucher with no geographicrestrictions. The control group received no voucher through MTO, thoughthe participants were permitted to remain in their public housing unitsor to apply for other housing assistance that became available to themoutside of the MTO demonstration (such as a regular Section 8 voucher).Most controls subsequently moved out of their baseline neighborhoods,in part because of large-scale demolition of public housing in many U.S.cities. However, their moves were typically to other high-poverty neigh-borhoods.

MTO was designed to test what happens when poor families are offeredthe opportunity to move into low-poverty neighborhoods through a re-stricted housing voucher, and the demonstration’s design offers a strongtest of this policy effect. Some researchers have questioned whether MTOcan be used to measure the effect of neighborhoods on individual outcomes(Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002; Sobel 2006; Clampet-Lundquist and Massey 2008), whereas others have argued that MTO isquite informative about the impact of residential context on outcomes(Goering and Feins 2003; Kling et al. 2007; Ludwig et al. 2008). Despitethese contrasting views, the MTO in-depth interview data offer a uniqueopportunity for scholars to understand the social processes operatingwithin the variety of neighborhoods that the MTO teens have movedthrough and how their experiences may vary by gender.

In 2002, the MTO Interim Survey attempted to interview all household

3 Of those who used an MTO experimental voucher, only about one-quarter used itto move to a neighborhood that was less than 30% minority. On average, these neigh-borhoods were more resource rich (measured by community indicators) than higher-minority neighborhoods even within a similar poverty range because of the legacy ofresidential segregation (Clampet-Lundquist and Massey 2008).4 MTO applicants who were deemed eligible for the program were a more economicallydisadvantagd population than the remaining public housing families in the five cities,so the “creaming” that may have taken place in the Gautreaux program does notappear to have happened in MTO (Goering, Feins, and Richardson 2002).


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heads in the MTO experiment, as well as their school-age children andteens, to determine what effect the treatment had on a variety of adultand youth outcomes. Five to seven years after random assignment, thesurvey found that experimental group families were still living in signifi-cantly less poor neighborhoods, on average, than families in the controlgroup. Thus MTO achieved its main policy goal. In addition, surveyfindings reveal that the intervention had a significant and positive effecton a number of other important outcomes. For example, adults in theexperimental group felt safer and perceived less neighborhood disorderthan those in the control group (Kling et al. 2007). Moreover, experimentaladults reaped substantial positive mental health benefits relative to con-trols. Yet contrary to expectation, the survey did not detect beneficialeffects on other important adult outcomes such as employment or welfarereceipt.

The most surprising results of the MTO demonstration, however, werethe sharply divergent treatment effects for adolescent boys and girls. Whilethere were significant mental health gains for experimental girls, whoscored much lower than control girls on psychological distress and gen-eralized anxiety, the survey found no effect on boys’ mental health (Klinget al. 2007). Findings from a qualitative study conducted in three MTOcities—New York, Los Angeles, and Boston—suggest that sexual pre-dation of young women may be less frequent in low-poverty neighbor-hoods than in high-poverty environments and that a decline in girls’experiences of sexual harassment may have been key in improving themental health of girls, but not of boys (Briggs, Popkin, and Goering 2010).However, the survey did not ask about sexual predation.

Striking gender differences in teens’ risk behaviors—the focus of ouranalysis—were evident as well (Kling et al. 2007). Experimental girls wereless likely to report smoking marijuana in the past month than controlgirls, but experimental boys were significantly more likely to report smok-ing cigarettes or drinking alcohol in the past month than their controlgroup counterparts. Experimental boys were also more likely to self-reportbehavior problems relative to controls. Furthermore, administrative rec-ords revealed that MTO experimental males 15–25 years old had beenarrested more often for property crime than controls had (Kling, Ludwig,and Katz 2005).5

Since, owing to funding constraints, our qualitative study was limitedto only two of the five MTO cities, Baltimore and Chicago, we investigated

5 The administrative arrest data, as well as earlier studies of MTO in Baltimore (Lud-wig, Ladd, and Duncan 2001) and Boston (Katz, Kling, and Liebman 2001), indicatedthat these gender differences in effects were not evident during the first two yearsafter random assignment.


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whether these gender differences in risk behaviors were apparent amongBaltimore and Chicago survey sample youths ages 15–19 (app. table A1).6

Consistent with the five-city results, we found that experimental girls inBaltimore and Chicago were significantly less likely than controls to reportproblem and risky behaviors. However, experimental males were morelikely than controls to report problem behaviors and risky activities.

Thus, both overall and in Chicago and Baltimore, the MTO interven-tion had a sharply different effect by gender. However, we know littlefrom the survey data about the social processes that may have beenresponsible for these differences. Our article uses in-depth interview datafrom a stratified random subsample of MTO families with teen girls andboys in Baltimore and Chicago to explore potential processes that maybe at work to create this interaction between treatment group and gender.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The teens in our sample were part of a housing mobility demonstrationthat offered some of their families the chance to move to a low-povertyneighborhood while making no such offer to others. Most of the controlgroup teens changed residences as well but typically remained in high-poverty neighborhoods. Their experiences, and the gender differences inimpacts the survey revealed, arose at least in part from the neighborhoodenvironments to which each group was subsequently exposed.

The belief that neighborhoods matter and are an important locus ofstudy was the basis of the Chicago school and other foundational socio-logical work (Park, Burgess, and Mackenzie 1925; Zorbaugh 1929; Drakeand Cayton 1945; Suttles 1968; Hannerz 1969; Rainwater 1970). Theemphasis on neighborhoods was reinvigorated by Wilson (1987), whohypothesized that the extreme social isolation, concentrated poverty, andjoblessness that characterized many urban neighborhoods were especiallydeleterious to children. Scholars have documented that such neighbor-hoods have sharply elevated rates of infant mortality, child maltreatment,and social and physical disorder and that the teenagers living in themare more prone to school dropout, delinquent behavior, and adolescentchildbearing (see reviews by Ellen and Turner [1997], Leventhal andBrooks-Gunn [2000], and Sampson et al. [2002]).

A number of intriguing hypotheses have been advanced to explain howneighborhood context may affect adolescent behavior (Jencks and Mayer1990), and each has produced a body of empirical results. These include

6 Concurrent with our study, researchers conducted a mixed-methods study in the threeother MTO cities: Boston, New York, and Los Angeles (Briggs et al. 2010).


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neighborhood collective efficacy (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997;Sampson et al. 2002; Cohen, Farley, and Mason 2003; Duncan et al. 2003;Blaney et al. 2004; Browning, Leventhal, and Brooks-Gunn 2004; Cagneyand Browning 2004), peer effects (Johnstone 1978; Case and Katz 1991;Kowaleski-Jones 2000; Wikstrom and Loeber 2000; but see Ludwig andKling 2007), adult role models both distal (e.g., neighbors) (Wilson 1987)and proximal (i.e., parents) (see the review by Burton and Jarrett [2000]),and relative deprivation (Turley 2002; Luttmer 2005). Most predict pos-itive outcomes for low-income teens moving to lower-poverty neighbor-hoods, though notions of relative deprivation anticipate the opposite.However, this literature has limited utility for the surprising pattern ofempirical results explored here, since none of these models predict dif-ferences in outcomes by gender.

A small body of recent qualitative work offers some insight into thesocial processes that might underlie these gender differences. In her in-terviews with low-income African-American students in a high school inYonkers, New York, Prudence Carter (2003) describes how teens use bothdominant and “nondominant” cultural capital as they navigate the worldsof school and work. This nondominant cultural capital collectively rep-resents the adoption of language styles, dress, and music tastes her subjectsdeploy in an effort to differentiate themselves from teenagers in the dom-inant group (whites) and to assert their own group membership. InCarter’s study, boys were not as adept as girls at strategically employingdominant cultural capital in beneficial ways as they interacted with schoolofficials or employers. In her ethnographic study of Dominican, WestIndian, and Haitian American young adults, Lopez (2003, p. 110) arguesthat males and females from the same family backgrounds and neigh-borhood contexts have “fundamentally different cumulative experiences”in the school setting and in the work world. In her study, some of thesedifferences were rooted in others’ expectations and perceptions, includinggender-biased roles within the family and outsiders’ racist stereotypes ofblack males as criminals and black females as sexual objects.

Of course, the extant literature reveals any number of gender differencesacross a wide array of adolescent behaviors, especially delinquency. Thisis not our focus here. Rather, we are interested in how a residential mo-bility program interacts with these gender differences to produce differentimpacts for girls and boys. The potential utility of Carter’s and Lopez’swork becomes evident when we consider the ethnographic work of ElijahAnderson (1990) and Janelle Dance (2002), who observed the behaviorsof low-income African-American male youths in Philadelphia and Boston,respectively. To ensure their survival, the male teens Dance studied stra-tegically adopted “gangsterlike posturing” (p. 7), whereas the young menAnderson observed found it necessary to adopt a certain street posture—


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whether they were law-abiding or not—to create the impression that theywere not to be messed with. In Anderson’s study, male teens persisted inthis self-presentation as they traversed adjacent low-poverty neighbor-hoods, and this produced cultural conflict: specifically, residents and policetreated these boys with a high degree of suspicion and mistrust.

If the “tough” self-presentation these scholars document is more com-mon among boys than among girls and if, as Carter and Anderson suggest,boys have more difficulty deploying dominant cultural capital in envi-ronments that demand it, such as lower-poverty neighborhoods, the cul-tural conflict that results may limit low-income boys’ ability to benefitfrom exposure to neighborhoods with more resources. In fact, culturalconflict might feed into preexisting stereotypes of low-income black males,leading to increased monitoring by neighborhood adults, school officials,and police, with the possible result of increased behavior problems and/or higher arrest rates.

DATA AND METHODS

Our analysis uses data from teens in the control group to explore genderdifferences in behavior in the absence of the MTO intervention. We thenturn to experimental “complier” teens—those who “complied” by movingwith an MTO voucher—to understand how the MTO treatment mighthave affected boys differently than girls. In Baltimore, 58% of those inthe experimental group offered vouchers used them to move to a low-poverty neighborhood. Almost all had since moved on to other neigh-borhoods that, while poorer than their placement neighborhoods, werestill, on average, considerably more affluent than their origin neighbor-hoods. In Chicago, only 34% of those in the experimental group usedtheir voucher.7 Because of this low take-up rate, we interviewed onlyexperimental compliers in Chicago. Therefore, in this article, we analyzethe interview data from the teens in the experimental complier group andin the control group for both cities, as shown in figure 1. While there aredifferences among experimental compliers and noncompliers in terms ofparental characteristics, there were no significant differences in child be-haviors at baseline that would predispose the youths in the complier groupto have more difficulties than youths in the noncomplier or control groups(Shroder 2002; Snell 2010).

We have combined the Chicago and Baltimore data in this analysis fortwo reasons. First, the gender differences observed in the MTO Interim

7 We have not included the Section 8 treatment group in the analysis since we wantedto keep the focus on the sharp policy difference between the experimental low-povertyvoucher group and the control group.


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Fig. 1.—Groups included in the analysis

Survey were present in all five sites pooled together, as well as when wecombined Baltimore and Chicago (see app. table A1). In addition, com-bining both sites provides us with a larger group of male and femaleyouths. As such, we did not systematically explore city differences in theanalysis in this article, though certainly they are cities that provide dif-ferent social and economic contexts. For example, when we conductedour fieldwork, Baltimore had a lower median household income comparedwith Chicago; Baltimore also had a slightly higher poverty rate and ahigher share of African-Americans in the city. While these site differencesare important to note, the MTO youths and their families in both citieswere quite similar demographically.

Ideally, we would like to examine gender differences among experi-mental teens whose families moved in conjunction with the program incomparison to control group teens whose families would have made aprogram move had they been offered the chance. Since we do not observethis hypothetical behavior, we use information gathered from all of thecontrol group teens. Other research using the entire MTO survey samplefound few average differences between likely compliers and noncompliersin the control group (Kling et al. 2007). When the overall control meansby gender are similar (say, as they are for smoking marijuana in the past30 days), then the estimated control complier means tend to be morebeneficial for boys (lower marijuana use) and more adverse for girls (highermarijuana use). These results imply that our qualitative analysis in thisarticle, where we use the full control group, tends to understate genderdifferences relative to those among the likely compliers in the controlgroup. Meanwhile, the experimental complier means for an outcome likemarijuana use are more adverse for boys and more beneficial for girls insurvey data, which is directly reflected in our qualitative analysis. On thebasis of this pattern of results, we believe that the gender differences in


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experimental outcomes we analyze here would be even more pronouncedif we were able to contrast experimental compliers with likely controlcompliers.

Interviews took place between July 2003 and June 2004. We contacteda total of 184 youths from households selected at random from the threegroups at the outset of the study and ultimately interviewed 131, for aresponse rate of 71%.8 All of the teens were African-American, and themedian length of time at their current residence ranged from one and ahalf years (experimental girls) to three years (control boys). Control girlswere slightly older than teens in the other three groups (median age is 17vs. 16), were the least likely to be enrolled in school, and were nearlytwice as likely to have been pregnant or had a baby as experimental girls.The control boys were more likely to be living in public housing than theother three groups. The experimental girls were the most likely to becurrently employed (32%). However, proportionally more experimentalboys were employed (27%) than control boys (4%). Though the percentageemployed was similar between the experimental boys and girls, girls weremore likely to be employed full-time, whereas only one boy in the ex-perimental group had a full-time job.

Most (just over 80%) of the experimental teens in this analysis hadmoved at some point since relocating to their MTO placement neigh-borhoods. Many control girls and boys had also moved from their originalpublic housing after random assignment. Consequently, controls movedto, and continued to live in, neighborhoods that, while less impoverishedthan the housing projects they resided in at baseline, were still quite poor,with average tract poverty rates of 30% for control males and 39% forcontrol females. Since families in the experimental group were requiredto live at their low-poverty address for only one year to continue to beeligible for their voucher-based rent subsidy and since the low end of theprivate rental market is inherently unstable, the subsequent mobility forthese families meant that most teens did not experience a sustained ex-posure to a very low-poverty environment. In fact, at the time that weinterviewed them (six to nine years after random assignment), the exper-imental teens in this analysis lived, on average, in neighborhoods withtwice the poverty rate, which was the neighborhood eligibility cutoff for

8 In households containing at least one teenager between 14 and 19, we attempted tointerview the teen as well as the adult. For households with more than one teen, werandomly selected a “focal youth.” Among households with children ages 14–19, wesampled evenly among households that did and did not have children ages 8–13, aspart of a parallel study on younger children. The reasons for nonresponse includeinability to locate the family at all, foster care placement, death of the adult respondentwith no valid contact information for the youth’s current caregiver, and death of theyouth.


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MTO placement neighborhoods (19% for girls, 21% for boys). However,during the years prior to our interviews, those in the experimental grouphad lived in neighborhoods with significantly lower poverty, on average,compared to their control counterparts. It is important to remember that,in general, experimental households in Baltimore and Chicago moved toneighborhoods that were overwhelmingly African-American. Thus, incontrast to Gautreaux, the main demographic change they experiencedwas economic rather than racial.

Our interviews were organized around six themes: teens’ views andexperiences of their neighborhoods, their perceptions of their relative so-cial status (to measure relative deprivation), their experiences at school,their daily routines, their adult and peer networks, and their mental andphysical health. Research literature on neighborhoods and teens, as wellas findings from the MTO Interim Survey, indicates the salience of thesethemes. In these semistructured interviews, our goal was to elicit the“whole story” on a given topic, probing for detailed, specific examples.Though consistent data were collected across all research subjects, inter-viewers were trained to alter the order and wording of the questions tofit with the flow of the interview and the particulars of the person’s story.Typical questions included “Where do you hang out in the neighborhood?”and “What do you like best/least in your neighborhood?” Each questionwas followed up with probes, both those indicated in the interview guideand additional probes at the interviewer’s discretion. Interviews weretaped and usually took one and a half to two hours to complete. Eachadolescent was paid $35 for participating in the study. To protect confi-dentiality, teens were asked to choose a pseudonym.

Interview transcripts were coded by topic and entered into an electronicdatabase using Microsoft Access. Initial coding was primarily descriptiverather than analytic. Coders met weekly to ensure the reliability of thecoding process. We then imported interview material from these topicalfields into NVivo for more detailed analytic coding. At this stage, oneanalyst read through the data and coded for themes and subthemes andsystematically analyzed the coded material for patterns by gender andprogram group. These patterns were not derived from highly structureditems, but rather from material across the narratives. Information aboutdaily routines or friends, for example, often was spread out across theinterview, since we intentionally asked about topics in a variety of waysso as to be comprehensive.

Since we focus this analysis only on experimental compliers and con-trols, our sample size here is 86: 34 experimental compliers and 52 controls(see table 1). We compared four groups of youths: female and male controlgroup members and female and male experimental complier group mem-bers. In order to make systematic comparisons between girls and boys


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TABLE 1Subsample of Youth Respondents in Baltimore and Chicago Used in

Analysis

Males Females Totals

Baltimore:Experimental compliers . . . . . 7 11 18Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 17 36

Chicago:Experimental compliers . . . . . 8 8 16Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 11 16

Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 47 86

Note.—Experimental “compliers” moved using an MTO program voucher.

and between experimentals and controls, we handle the qualitative datain a somewhat “quantitative” way in the text. However, while we providecounts or proportions of patterns we find, we also use these data to dowhat qualitative data do best—offer a window into the worldviews, ex-periences, daily lives, and social contexts of these youths.

RESULTS

We organize our presentation of results on the basis of our inductiveanalyses of the in-depth interview data, focusing on several primary waysin which underlying differences between girls’ and boys’ behaviors wereassociated with variation in their responses to the MTO treatment. Ratherthan attempt a causal analysis, the primary utility of this article is togenerate hypotheses about the set of social processes that might underliethe surprising pattern of findings described in the introduction: that boysin the experimental group did no better in terms of delinquency and riskbehavior and, on some measures, performed even worse than control boys,whereas experimental girls showed significant gains in these domains rel-ative to controls. Hypothesis generation is especially useful for our topic,since none of the dominant explanations in the neighborhood effects lit-erature predict the observed gender differences. In the conclusion, wediscuss how these findings relate to and move beyond the extant literature.

Daily Routines

We asked teens to describe in detail how they spent their time after school,on the weekends, and during the summer. We were interested not onlyin what they were doing and with whom, but also where they were doingit. Teens in all four groups were equally likely to talk about spendingtime hanging out in other neighborhoods. Usually, these other neighbor-


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hoods were where their friends, grandmothers, and other family memberswere currently living, and through years of visiting, these teenagers hadcreated networks of friends in these neighborhoods.

Most of the control boys and girls spent the bulk of their after-schooland weekend time locally, within their current neighborhoods. While therewere no substantial gender differences among the controls as to wherethe teens spent their free time, experimental girls were significantly morelikely to spend time in the neighborhoods of school or work friends orrelatives than any other program group. Only one-third of experimentalgirls spent the bulk of their leisure time locally, a proportion substantiallylower than any of the other groups, yet a higher proportion of experimentalboys did so than any other group (79% compared to two-thirds of bothcontrol groups).9

In their current neighborhoods and in other neighborhoods, boys hungout by playing football or basketball at a local school, park, alley, innercourtyard, or vacant lot or loitering on street corners in front of bars andconvenience stores. Even on school nights, they sometimes stayed out forthree or four hours. Girls only rarely hung out in this way. Instead, theyspent their time inside the house or on the front stoop, talking and playingcards. Likewise, when girls visited friends or family in other neighbor-hoods, they usually spent their time inside or on their friends’ stoops orporches. This is not to say that girls never played ball or hung out onthe corner. They were, however, less likely than boys to use these as theirmain venues for spending leisure time, and many more girls than boysemphasized that they spent most of their free time close to, if not inside,the home.

Kelly, a 15-year-old girl in the experimental group, described a patternof hanging out that was fairly typical of the girls in the sample. Aftermoving through two other neighborhoods, she and her family currentlylived on a Baltimore block with a number of abandoned houses in a high-poverty neighborhood, though most of the drug activity was a few blocksaway. Kelly did not approve of the behavior of teens in the neighborhood:the boys “have bad words to say out their mouth about females,” and asfor the girls, “some of them like to start a lot of trouble, lot of confusion.Some of them run around here buck wild.” Kelly, though, maintained afairly quiet routine: “Sometimes [I hang out] at [my friend’s] house. . . .Uh, sometimes we go to some of her friends’ houses sometimes. Sometimeswe just sit down in the front [stoop], just play cards or whatever.” Kellyalso stayed at her aunt’s house in the suburbs and liked it since “it’squiet.”

9 These options of where teens hang out were not mutually exclusive; teens could reporton a number of different neighborhoods they spend time in.


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Girls in both program groups were also more likely than boys to makea point of visiting public places such as the downtown area, movies, andmalls. Most of the boys and girls went to the mall, to the movies, ordowntown, but the girls were more likely to use these spaces as alter-natives to hanging out in a neighborhood rather than in combination.Fourteen-year-old Bella, a control, moved out to a near suburb of Bal-timore two years before our interview. There, she was involved in anumber of after-school cultural and sports activities and kept herself busyin the evenings by staying at school. She had a number of friends fromschool, and when they were not engaged in school-related activities, theyhad a number of favorite pastimes: “We go to the mall, we go skatingand stuff like that.” Otherwise, she emphasized, “I don’t go outside a lot.I like to go places.” The “places” that girls could travel to depended onwhat the city had to offer. For the Baltimore girls, these consisted of theInner Harbor or suburban shopping malls, whereas Chicago girls traveled“downtown” to the State Street shopping district or to malls. Leaving theneighborhood to hang out in these spaces, or leaving the neighborhoodin order to go to work, provided an exit strategy for girls who wanted toavoid neighborhood peers.

Some experimental girls discussed how they were just “too busy” tohang out in the neighborhood or how they would breeze past the kids onthe corner as they were on their way out to work or another venture.Eighteen-year-old Isa, an experimental in Chicago, had worked full-timeas a cashier at a grocery store for the last year, while also going to schoolto earn certification as a nurse’s assistant. She went to high school withsome of the neighborhood teens but did not associate with them. She wasanything but impressed with the neighborhood boys’ activities: “You ain’tdoing nothing but sucking up atmosphere, you want to sell drugs andrun from the police all day you might as well just get yourself, go downthere to the police station and turn yourself in.” As for the girls in theneighborhood, she recognized more variation: “Girls around here aroundmy age, you got the ones that’s going to school or going to work, [but]then you got the ones that’s popping out babies left and right.” Isa putherself firmly in the former camp and stayed busy: “I walk past [the boyson the corner], so they call me stuck up because I don’t talk to them.[But] when I’m going to work, I’m going to work, when I’m going in thehouse, I’m going in the house, when I’m going out the neighborhood, I’mout of the neighborhood. I don’t talk to none of them people out there.”

Sports were not nearly as central in the lives of girls as they were forboys. Nearly every boy spent at least some time each week playing bas-ketball, football, and, to a lesser degree, baseball. Often, boys pursuedsports activities nearly every day. However, only a handful of boys acrossthe experimental and control groups spent any of their time in an orga-


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nized sports league or school team. Boys in the control and experimentalgroups in Baltimore usually played basketball out of doors in a park orput up a hoop in an alley or vacant lot, whereas Chicago boys oftenplayed in each other’s backyards.

The penchant of boys for hanging out in noninstitutional venues couldhave also put them at more risk. For example, they sometimes playedsports in places where others were engaged in buying and selling drugs.Jay, a 16-year-old in the control group who lived in a Northwest Baltimoreneighborhood after moving from public housing, liked to play basketballat a local outdoor court and in a nearby alley where someone had mounteda hoop. Usually he and his friends played pickup games with adults theydid not know. Just a block away is a major thoroughfare where, accordingto Jay, “You can’t find a block . . . without drug dealers.” To avoid havingevidence on them in case the police came by, sellers stashed their drugsin vacant houses. Jay had recently witnessed a man secreting his drugsin a house off the alley where they played ball: “There’s another placeright here, we play basketball in this alley . . . and a man, when peoplepass by he’ll go—right where we play basketball, there’s a big house—he’ll go right in there to get [his stash] and all that stuff.”

Interestingly, when girls played ball, it was more often in a court at-tached to, or inside of, a recreation center, where adults were also present.Girls also described other activities as well—pastimes that were nearlyabsent in boys’ lives, including playing in the marching band, practicingat a dance studio, or roller skating at a rink with friends. What is notablehere is that girls’ activities frequently occurred in a setting where therewas adult supervision.

Neighborhood Norms and Social Control

We hypothesize that the underlying differences in where and how girlsand boys hung out both put girls at less risk overall and had a significanteffect on how boys and girls adapted when they moved via MTO froma high-poverty to a low-poverty neighborhood and beyond. The neigh-borhoods where experimental families moved were generally predomi-nantly African-American, at least in Baltimore and Chicago, but theydiffered substantially in terms of social class. These neighborhoods haddifferent norms for acceptable neighborhood behavior and the collectiveefficacy to enforce them. This variation in norms around public behavioris described by Pattillo (2007), who studied a mixed-income African-Amer-ican neighborhood in Chicago.

We asked teens to describe both the neighborhoods they resided in atpresent and the low-poverty neighborhoods they originally moved to aspart of the MTO demonstration. Especially in Baltimore, the experimental


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boys were more likely to describe their placement neighborhoods nega-tively. When an interviewer asked Bart, a 16-year-old who had movedback to a poor East Baltimore neighborhood, what his experimental moveneighborhood in the suburbs was like, he said, “It was just too quiet. Idon’t like a lot of quiet. I don’t like that. It was too quiet.” In contrast,most of the girls described their program move neighborhoods in posi-tive—sometimes glowing—terms, usually noting how quiet they were(boys typically equated quiet with boring). Eighteen-year-old Naomi, inthe experimental group, currently attended community college andworked part-time. She lived in a leafy well-kept neighborhood on the edgeof Baltimore. She explained, “See, at first I couldn’t get used to the qui-etness because I was used to like noise because we was like on the streetside [in the projects]. I’ve gotten used to it now.” Naomi enjoyed feelingsafe on her quiet street.

We found some evidence that the less poor yet still largely African-American neighborhoods to which the experimentals moved were far lessaccepting of the male newcomers than of the female teens in our study,or at least the experimental boys believed that this was so. One concreteindicator of acceptance on the part of the receiving neighborhoods is policesurveillance. There were minimal differences in reports of hassles by policebetween experimental and control girls, yet while boys in both groupscomplained much more about police harassment than girls,10 experimentalboys were more likely than any other group (73% vs. 58% for controlboys) to describe being questioned or hassled by the police. In fact, someof the experimental boys who lived or had lived in the suburbs associatedthe suburbs with increased police surveillance, a theme that was rare inthe experimental girls’ accounts. Ron was an 18-year-old who lived inthe Baltimore suburb where his family initially moved with the low-poverty voucher. He had just graduated from high school and was work-ing full-time as a stock boy for a large retail store. While he admitted hewas involved in delinquent behavior (more below), he claimed that hisneighbors called the police nearly every time he and his friends chose tocongregate publicly:

You can’t really [hang out in the neighborhood] because it’s like mixed [inthis area] with like white and black. . . . So if you see a group of blackpeople and then like white people look out the window and call the policeand they just say, “You gotta leave,” and there’s nowhere to go. Like theydon’t want us to be together, like if we’re together they say, “You gotta go.”Like if you don’t live around here you have to leave. But nobody lives in

10 Instances of telling youths to move on from loitering or picking them up for loitering,for mistaken identity, and for curfew violations were included in this measure. Notincluded were arrests for actual crimes.


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the same neighborhood so it’s like it’s . . . gonna be just you by yourself onyour steps.

Tiah, a 15-year-old experimental, also lived in a racially mixed suburbjust outside of Baltimore. Similarly to Ron, she complained that her neigh-bors called the police “all the time” over “stupid stuff,” including a timewhen she and her friend were merely “play fighting.” She believed thatthe reason was that white neighbors were concerned about African-Amer-icans like her moving into “their” space: “Out here we have a lot of whitepeople and they’re concerned about their safety which I understand be-cause . . . they think that we are the cause of everything. . . . When toomany black people move into an area, the white people move out.”

One might presume, on the basis of these two accounts, that only maleexperimentals in mixed or mostly white neighborhoods reported suchproblems, but most experimental boys lived in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, and several of them reported this kind of sur-veillance as well. For experimental boys, such surveillance stemmed, intheir view, from the main social activity they had become accustomed toin their origin neighborhoods—hanging out in groups on street corners,basketball courts, or vacant lots. Because of this, some felt it was difficultto have any social life in the suburbs, thus rendering these environmentsboring. Roger, a 16-year-old Chicago experimental who was initiallyplaced in a mostly black suburb, told us, “I was in the suburbs. Therewasn’t nothing to do at all. Police always messing with you. Talking aboutyou doing this, you’re doing that.” He was now living back in Chicago,in a neighborhood where he had been shot a little over a year prior toour interview. Roger had also served time in the juvenile detention centerand was still on probation when we spoke with him.

Ed experienced several instances of police harassment in his relativelylow-poverty and largely African-American neighborhood on the SouthSide of Chicago, where he had relocated six years ago when his familymoved on from their MTO placement neighborhood after two years. Eddescribed two particularly aggressive police officers in his current neigh-borhood who, he claimed, had arrested every male except for him andwere prone to do so no matter what the boys were doing, just so thatthey could be promoted. Though he had not been arrested yet, he main-tained he was stopped at least once every three weeks. Ed was unusualfor our sample, as he spent six days out of the week at his church, par-ticipating in various youth activities. But according to Ed, even leavingchurch could be an occasion for getting stopped by the police:

Everywhere we go, we going to get stopped by the police because . . . theycan always say we look suspicious and stuff. . . . We got stopped, me andmy friend, coming out of the church gate before, by the detectives. . . . Theytalking about there was gunshots on the next block and we match the de-


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scription or whatever. . . . They was like, “Do y’all got guns?” or something.“We heard shooting on the next block. Y’all match the description. Wherey’all just come from?” We like, “We just came out the church. Y’all doneseen it.” You know, just, they stopping us for no reason.

Our in-depth interviews with control group youths indicate that—with-out participation in the MTO intervention—teens in low-income neigh-borhoods in Baltimore and Chicago engaged in patterns of hanging outthat were highly shaped by gender. These differences were apparent forthe experimentals as well. However, the girls’ pattern of leisure activity“fit” far better with what was expected in the low-poverty neighborhoods.It certainly drew less negative attention from neighbors or the police. Inaddition, since girls were less likely to venture beyond their living roomsand stoops and more likely to go to the mall, downtown, or the moviesrather than hang out locally, they had to make fewer adjustments to thenorms and restrictions in their new environments. However, Ron’s andEd’s accounts are filled with stories about getting in trouble with thepolice merely by hanging out with friends on the corner or in the parkinglot of the school, leaving church, or just walking down the street in agroup. In the MTO Interim Survey, adults in the experimental group weremore likely than those in the control group to report that neighbors wouldintervene with youths hanging out on street corners (Orr et al. 2003). Anegative side of neighborhood collective efficacy is revealed in the teens’narratives here, as neighborhood monitoring interacted with highly gen-dered daily routines in ways that may have led to divergent outcomes forboth boys and girls.

Neighborhood Navigational Strategies

If teen males who move from high-poverty public housing into low-poverty neighborhoods encounter difficulties fitting in with the norms ofthose neighborhoods, then what happens when they move back to poorerneighborhoods? The stories from the control boys, who largely stayedwithin moderate to high-poverty neighborhoods, and the experimentalboys suggest that the experimental boys seem to encounter a differentproblem—how to navigate these poorer neighborhoods. Detailed descrip-tions of their daily routines indicated that a significant minority of controlsdid not hang out in their current neighborhoods at all. This choice mayhave been part of a larger strategy to avoid trouble, and evidence ofnavigational skills. John, a control group male, was 16 years old and hadlived in the same Baltimore public housing development his entire life.He characterized the drug problem in his neighborhood as “out in theopen a lot, like you like walking around here, you’ll see like little drugvials and stuff on the ground.” The neighborhood was also plagued by


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teen violence. To avoid it, John stopped hanging around his neighborhoodand began hanging out in his grandmother’s neighborhood after schooland on weekends: “I used to hang out around here a lot but then that’swhen I . . . started fighting a lot. Like when people just start, be fighting[I] sort of got in a fight a lot, and I started going around another neigh-borhood.”

Particularly in high-crime Baltimore, control boys were much morelikely than experimentals to have developed a complex set of neighbor-hood navigational skills: conscious strategies for avoiding unwantedneighborhood trouble. These were far less frequently deployed by exper-imental boys despite the fact that by the time that we interviewed them,most had made subsequent moves to higher-poverty neighborhoods thantheir placement addresses (though still significantly less poor on averagethan those of the controls). Many of the control boys offered detaileddescriptions of the blocks or street corners where dangerous activitiestypically occurred, as well as the times of day that were most hazardous.Such intimate knowledge of neighborhood “hot spots” may be quite con-sequential as recent research in Boston shows that over a 29-year period,74% of nonfatal shootings occurred in only 5% of the city’s street cornersand face blocks (Braga, Papachristos, and Hureau 2010). Few of theseboys were exemplary in their behavior; they still got in plenty of trouble.However, when they wanted to avoid “the bad element,” many felt theyhad strategies that would allow them to do so, including consciouslyaltering their routines, especially their routes to and from school, or choos-ing to spend their time in another, less dangerous neighborhood, oftenwhere a grandmother or cousin lived. Fifteen-year-old Lincoln, in thecontrol group, had moved from public housing to a high-poverty Chicagoneighborhood five years prior. At the time of the interview, he was re-peating ninth grade since he had missed so much school from suspensionsearned from such actions as throwing desks at other students and teachersand assaulting school security guards. Although Lincoln believed that hisreputation as a fighter offered him some protection from bullying by otherboys, he specifically avoided certain areas in his neighborhood because“that’s just begging to get into a fight.”

Sixteen-year-old Scott, a control, had lived in a low-rise public housingdevelopment in Baltimore his entire life. The development was dividedby the buildings into inner courtyards, and both the outside and insideof Scott’s row house were kept neat and organized by his mother. He hada rich sense of the geography of danger within the courtyards and on thecorners of the project and, encouraged by his strict mother, tried hard tosteer clear of these areas. “I know [the guys on those corners] but theyain’t my friends. They [are into] drugs and loitering and stuff like I don’treally [do]. I mind my business.” Scott’s narrative is one illustration of


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how control boys, especially in Baltimore, are more likely than the ex-perimental boys to have reported deploying a related strategy—often re-ferred to as “staying to myself”; here boys specifically avoided associatingwith others so as to circumvent trouble. However, having to maintainthis level of caution was not without consequences, as Scott explains: “Idon’t want to get caught up in nothing I don’t got nothing to do with. Ijust stay in the house. I be wanting to go around there but I don’t. It bepressure on me. [Interviewer: Is there any place that you can go to tryand get away from that pressure?] I go to the library sometimes [and] geton the computer or read a book or something.”

Both the in-depth neighborhood knowledge and the formulation anduse of these navigational skills were notably absent in the accounts ofexperimental boys. To understand how this differentiation may have oc-curred, recall that the experimental boys moved from their housing proj-ects to neighborhoods that were less than 10% poor when they werebetween the ages of 5 and 13. Though subsequent moves have placedthem in neighborhoods that were significantly poorer than their placementneighborhoods, many spent several of their formative years in neighbor-hood environments with considerable social, as well as geographic, dis-tance from their origin neighborhoods. Moving to a low-poverty neigh-borhood, if only for a time, may have robbed some of the experimentalboys of the opportunity to develop knowledge and key skills that wouldlater have proven protective for those who, through subsequent moves,had to adapt to new, poorer neighborhoods later on. Development of theseskills does not occur in a social vacuum: peers and older role modelscontribute to a youth’s knowledge of how to navigate a neighborhood(Harding 2009). Same-age and somewhat older peers were lacking in someof the low-poverty placement neighborhoods. A handful of the experi-mental boys described their placement neighborhoods as very quiet orwithout children their age.

Here is how Tony, a 15-year-old experimental, described one of the low-poverty neighborhoods he moved through: “There were like no kids on[Hamilton] Street. . . . [We] ain’t never be out.” Tony complained thatthere was no place to play around there, and he would mainly stay inthe house. He has since moved back to a high-poverty neighborhood andlives adjacent to a public housing development. While the absence ofadolescents in his MTO placement neighborhood may have boded wellfor a reduction in delinquency in that particular neighborhood, it mayalso have laid a shaky foundation for boys who moved back to poorerneighborhoods with more corner activity if they did not have as muchexperience of learning whom to avoid. Other research has shown howdeveloping a clear sense of neighborhood-specific norms and knowledgeof others in the neighborhood may be critical for young males as they


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cope with the dangers of high-poverty communities (Anderson 1990;Young 1999).

As a result of large-scale destruction of the highly distressed publichousing complexes our sample lived in at baseline, control boys had fre-quently moved through an unrestricted Section 8 voucher. Nevertheless,their moves were far more proximate, both geographically and socially.The homogeneous nature of their residential experiences, we hypothesize,induced more of the control boys to formulate the necessary knowledgeand navigation skills to avoid the more dangerous aspects of the neigh-borhood if they wished. Experimental boys, by contrast, moved initiallyto neighborhoods where “corner activity” and “street drama” were lesscommon and such skills were less necessary. Over time, however, as theyhad to adapt to other, more risky environments, they were at a disad-vantage. While the heterogeneity of their residential experiences couldhave broadened their “cultural tool kit” (Swidler 1986) and might havemade it possible for the experimental boys to develop the ability to stra-tegically deploy cultural capital in their new neighborhoods, which weremore likely to demand this (Carter 2003), we did not find evidence thatthis occurred. Instead, most of these boys seemed caught in between com-peting sets of neighborhood norms—too “project” for the low-povertyneighborhoods they were placed in but too “naı̈ve” for the higher-povertyneighborhoods many subsequently faced over time.

Interaction with Neighborhood Peers

Part of navigating neighborhoods includes discerning whom to hang outwith. In in-depth interviews, we asked teens to describe in detail theirsocial connections with peers in their current neighborhood.11 The controlgirls were much more engaged in their current locales and thus morelikely to associate with their neighborhood peers than the experimentalgirls. Experimental girls, by contrast, were quite disengaged from theircurrent neighborhoods. Aja, a 14-year-old Chicago experimental who stilllived at her program destination address when interviewed, told the in-

11 We also conducted a direct test of the relative deprivation hypothesis mentionedabove using a scale (mainly deployed in health research) that assesses subjective socialstatus (Goodman et al. 2001; Singh-Manoux, Adler, and Marmot 2003). We asked teensto place their families and themselves on a social status ladder relative to individualsin their schools and neighborhoods. Interestingly, there were no gender or programgroup differences in where these teens placed themselves. We also asked them to talkmore in depth about why they placed themselves where they did. If relative deprivationwere at work (at least in a conscious way) to generate the gender-treatment interactionoutcomes in the survey data, we would expect that the experimental boys would saythat they felt isolated because they measured themselves unfavorably against theirmore affluent neighbors or schoolmates. However, they did not.


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terviewer that she “fell in with the wrong crowd” in eighth grade but hadsince focused more on school. For much of her childhood, she lived withher aunt and then grandmother in a public housing apartment, and shewas now living with her mother and long-time family friend who alsohelped to raise her. There were mainly older people in her neighborhood,and the few teens are older than she. Despite her neighborhood’s relativelylow poverty rate, Aja’s mother instructed her to avoid social interactionwith these teens, many of whom she considered “bad” or “wild.” “[They’re]bad influence kids, basically. And I’m not allowed to hang [in the neigh-borhood] because I don’t want to be caught on it ’cause that stuff’s bad.I mean that puts me off track, and I don’t even like that.”

Tiah, in the Baltimore experimental group, lived in a low-poverty, ra-cially mixed suburb. Despite her suburban neighborhood’s relative ad-vantages, she viewed the local peer network with suspicion and shieldedherself accordingly: “The girls in my neighborhood is about one thing:smoking marijuana, which is not good for you. And they think that’s theonly thing that they can do. . . . And the girls I know are very addictedand . . . they only 15—15, 16 years old, you know, and they been doingit for a while. And the guys are the same way.” Tiah employed the fol-lowing strategy to stay safe and out of trouble: “Stay to yourself, mindyour own business. Don’t be in Mary, Harry, Dick and them, don’t be intheir business, it’s not good. Be in your own business. You know you do,[if] you in everybody else’s business, your name gonna pop up.” Tiahspent time with only one neighborhood friend, whom she met at work,and they did not hang out in the neighborhood. Instead, they chose to goto the movies and the mall: “That’s why I really don’t associate withanyone in this area except for my one friend. . . . We’re very cool. That’sthe only person I do associate with, ’cause we work together and I knewher for a while. . . . And we don’t really be around here like that.”

Like Aja and Tiah, many experimental girls sought friends at schoolor at work, not in the immediate community. They spent weeknights athome completing homework and talking with friends on the phone. Con-trol girls also remained close to home, limiting their scope of activity tothe front rooms of their homes, their front stoops, or a supervised after-school activity. They were far more engaged with neighborhood peers butstill exercised care in their friendship selections.

Experimental and control group boys were equally likely to have tiesto neighborhood teens, but a close reading of their narratives revealsimportant differences in the level of selectivity boys in each group exer-cised when choosing which neighborhood peers to associate with. Ex-perimental boys were less discriminating in their friendship choices thancontrols. After several years, the family of 14-year-old Ralph moved backfrom their low-poverty Baltimore neighborhood to a significantly poorer


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one. Ralph’s description of his new neighborhood peers was far fromglowing: “People I know [around here], they probably go to school halfof the time and just be on the streets most of the time.” Yet Ralph didnot see this as a reason to avoid certain peers. He bragged that one closefriend routinely carried around a pellet gun and threatened people withit, while another had recently kicked out windows on the city bus on theway to school. Moreover, Ralph saw little risk in associating with theolder teens and young adult males in his neighborhood. One, a local drugdealer, had just been talking to Ralph about how he could get some new“Jordans” if he was willing to “hold something” for the dealer.

Fifteen-year-old Jamison first moved to a suburb when his family re-ceived the MTO voucher, but after one year, he too moved with his familyto a somewhat higher-poverty neighborhood in Chicago. Currently, hewas suspended from school, as had become common, for fighting, in-cluding fighting with school security guards. His account offers an ex-ample of how experimental boys made friends in their new neighborhoods:“I was playing on the side of the house with a yo-yo and they just cameup like, ‘What’s your name?’ Like, ‘You want to go to the park?’” Heand his friends had been engaging in taunts and fights with boys fromanother neighborhood—so much so that Jamison had to be careful notto cross his neighborhood’s boundaries. They also held parties regularlywith older teens in the neighborhood, consuming alcohol. In a volatilemix, they would sometimes invite the boys from the rival neighborhoodto these parties because “[we want] more people to come, that’s all. Justmake our party be more wild.”

In contrast, control boys typically held a more cautious view of thepeers in their local communities. They routinely distinguished betweenneighborhood peers who were involved in “street drama” such as fightingand selling drugs and those who were not. Marcus was a 16-year-old inthe control group and lived in a three-story row house in a high-povertyWest Baltimore neighborhood littered with vacant, boarded-up homes.Drugs and violence were common in his neighborhood, and recently, afriend had been killed while making a visit to the corner store. When weasked Marcus what people in the neighborhood were like, he replied, “Itall depends who you hang with. To me, you got people that you do hangwith and you don’t hang with. The ones I hang with like be motivatedand we keep ourself going. And other people like do drugs and stuff likethat. I try not to go on that page.”

In sum, girls and boys in the control group showed considerable dis-cernment in how they choose neighborhood friends, and experimentalgirls often withdrew from their neighborhood peers altogether, choosinginstead to forge friendships at school or at work. Boys in the experimentalgroup did not generally adopt either of these approaches.


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Delinquency among Friends

Friends are drawn not just from current neighborhoods but from school,family, and previous neighborhoods. We asked teens to describe each oftheir close friends in detail, including any form of delinquent activitythese friends were engaged in. In analyzing these narratives, we paidspecial attention to substance use and criminal activity among friendsand how these associations may have affected the behaviors of our teens.12

One concrete example of the “price” experimental boys might have paidfor their more varied residential histories, and the lack of peer discern-ment, neighborhood knowledge, and navigational skills that seemed toresult, was a greater likelihood of forming friendships with delinquentpeers than any other program group.

Slightly over half of the control girls and nearly three-quarters of thecontrol boys regularly associated with friends who smoked marijuana orcigarettes or drank alcohol. There was a similar gender difference amongthe experimentals, where only 39% of the girls but two-thirds of the boysassociated with friends who smoked or drank. Smoking weed and drinkingalcohol—hard liquor such as Hennessy or beer—were much more com-mon among the teens’ friends than cigarette smoking.

Somewhat surprisingly, given the higher rate of crime among boys thanamong girls in general, control girls and boys were equally likely (56%vs. 59%) to describe friends who were involved in illegal activities (rangingfrom bringing a weapon to school to being incarcerated for murder) orwho had been recently killed, almost always as a consequence of illegalactivity.13 Haylee, a 17-year-old Chicago teen in the control group, hadmoved out of public housing to a high-poverty neighborhood five yearsprior to our interview. When asked what boys her age did in her neigh-borhood, she replied, “kill each other, sell drugs.” She avoided hangingout in the neighborhood and had recently dropped out of school, in partbecause of frequent gang-related fights. She had also witnessed violencein a very personal way. Haylee described how she stood by, horrified, asher friend killed her sister’s friend. “All I seen my sister[’s] best friendlike this like gaspin’ for air. Just gaspin’ for air like anything. Blood startcomin’ out of her mouth and that’s like all I seen. And I’m lookin’ ’cause

12 Among our teens, most boys reported fighting on a fairly regular basis, and some ofthese fights were serious enough to result in an arrest. Both groups of boys reporteda variety of delinquent activities such as selling drugs, stealing cars, and assault. Notsurprisingly, given the large gender difference in delinquency for the population as awhole, girls in both groups were much less likely to be arrested than the boys. Girlsin the control group were much more likely to be involved in fights at school or inthe neighborhood than those in the experimental group.13 This does not include smoking marijuana or drinking alcohol. Fights were includedonly if they resulted in an arrest.


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it was crazy. . . . Then she just died. I couldn’t do nothin’ but just lookat her.”

The lack of a gender difference among controls is strikingly differentfrom the pattern for experimentals, where the males were over three timesas likely as females (92% vs. 27%) to describe friends who were deeplyinvolved in illegal activities or who had been killed as a result. Eighteen-year-old Ron, living in a Baltimore suburb, had a group of friends whomhe had landed in trouble with over and over. Currently on probation,Ron and his friends had, in the past, stolen cars and set a dumpster onfire. Ross, 19 years old, had also made a move to another neighborhoodin Baltimore with an experimental voucher but was currently incarcer-ated, serving a lengthy sentence. He learned the tricks of the drug tradefrom older teens while living in public housing but did not start sellingin earnest until he moved to the new MTO neighborhood, which was inan area that was rapidly becoming poorer. He told the interviewers thatall of his close friends were either locked up or dead. Jamison, describedearlier, had become involved, along with his friends, in a violent turf warover gang boundaries in his Chicago neighborhood:

If they come on our side, we just will have to show them they can’t comeback over here, that’s all. We stick, me and my friends we stick together.That’s all it is, and if they—the only time they come over here [is] whenthey ask for trouble. [Two days ago] they came over, they came over on[DeKalb], the next block over, and we were standing out there. And theysaid, “What y’all looking at?” And you know me, I got a big mouth, I said,“What Y’ALL looking at?” They said [to] come down there. I came downthere, we got to fightin’. But then police came, they locked about three, fourpeople up.

According to both boys and girls in the experimental group, drug traf-ficking and violence were still present in their current neighborhoods,though these threats were less intense in their neighborhood descriptionsthan those of the control teens.14 In all of these neighborhoods, the drugtrade was heavily male dominated (only one individual knew of a girlwho sold drugs). Thus, even for boys and girls living in similar neigh-borhoods, forging same-sex friendships with peers who hung out in theneighborhood presented far more risks to boys, at least in terms of ac-tivities relating to drugs. However, our analysis points to other patternsthat may explain why girls were more able to take advantage of the MTOexperience.

Experimental teenagers’ narratives about friends point to a consistent

14 In each group except for the control females, the Baltimore teens were much morelikely to describe drugs as a prevalent problem in their neighborhoods than the Chicagoteens were.


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theme: girls who made a low-poverty move were far less likely to havefriends who got into serious trouble than any other program group. Fur-thermore, as we indicated above, patterns of hanging out learned in publichousing not only brought unwanted neighbor and police surveillance forexperimental boys but also seemed to bring these boys into contact withthe most troubled youths in their communities. Because such behaviorwas less normative in the experimental teens’ neighborhoods than in thoseof the controls, a process of negative selection may have been operating,with more troubled boys available for socializing on street corners, bas-ketball courts, and other public venues. Highly gendered approaches toengaging their new neighborhoods, we argue, exposed experimental boys,but not girls, to the more deviant of their possible neighborhood peers.

Involvement of Social Fathers

Young people’s behavior at home, around the neighborhood, and in schoolis shaped, in part, by the adult role models in their lives. Teens talkedlittle about distal adult relationships with, for example, people in theirneighborhood they could look up to. Instead, their narratives revealedthat the most salient adult role models were adults (usually same-sex) wholived inside the household or visited frequently. Most of the MTO house-holds in Baltimore and Chicago were female-headed, which means thatgirls were much more likely to have a same-sex parent in their householdthan boys. Other researchers have hypothesized that part of the genderdifference in outcomes for teens in the MTO treatment may occur becauseboys were less likely than girls to have a same-sex parent involved in thefamily, whether coresiding or visiting regularly (Kling et al. 2007). Yetacross the four groups, there were no differences among our teens in theproportion of respondents who described having regular contact with theirbiological fathers; about one-third in all groups did so. The quality ofthat contact did not vary in any discernible way either.

We then looked at teens’ descriptions of father figures. There was nodifference between experimental and control girls in the likelihood thatthey had a father figure in their lives, and about a quarter in each groupdescribed such a relationship, usually their stepfather or their mother’sboyfriend. However, among the boys, there was a dramatic difference byprogram group in this domain. Control boys were nearly twice as likelyas experimental boys (63% vs. 33%) to describe a meaningful relationshipwith a close, caring male other than a biological father or, at the veryleast, that they had such a figure present in their lives. Only rarely didmothers’ current or past boyfriends play a social father role for boys; thisfunction was usually fulfilled by maternal uncles. Closer proximity be-tween control group boys and their kin seemed to afford more opportunity


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for these men to engage their nephews in meaningful mentoring. Movingvia an MTO voucher to a low-poverty neighborhood created social, aswell as geographical, distance from father figures. When geographic andsocial proximity to such men was decreased, the difficulties of maintaininga relationship increased, in part because casual encounters on the street(where boys tended to hang out) were less frequent.

For several of our control boys, the presence of a father figure con-tributed directly to their ability to avoid delinquent behavior. Howard, aChicago control, spent the year before our interview learning the tradeof pouring concrete with Job Corps. His current lifestyle was a dramaticchange from his childhood and teen years, where he was “always” engagedin fighting. This pattern of behavior began in elementary school, whenhe threatened his teacher with a knife. His family had to move fromChicago to another state after his mother and brother got in a fight withgang members because his brother was wearing the “wrong” colors.Throughout this time, his family, particularly his maternal uncle and aunt,continued to advise him to take a different path and urged him repeatedlyto stay in high school: “Everybody saying, telling me that if you keepfightin’ more and more and keep getting in trouble, you’ll get locked up,and then you get locked up man, you just threw your life away. . . . Andthen my friend [got] shot and I seen all that.” He attributed his turnaroundfrom running the streets to stable employment to his friend’s death andto this uncle and aunt, who lived close to his mother in Chicago: “Theythe one that told me about Job Corps, you know. They proud of me thatI made it through high school too, because they thought I wasn’t gonnamake it through high school. . . . If it weren’t for my aunt and my uncle,I’d be still on the streets, [coming] in the house late every day, being outthere, doing whatever.”

Greg was a 17-year-old in the control group whose mother’s youngerbrother—older than he by just a few years—had also been very involvedin his life. Sometimes, the value of this man’s influence was questionable.When Greg was 11, his uncle bullied him into beating up other boys inthe neighborhood because “if I don’t beat them up, he beat me up.” Lately,though, his uncle had tried hard to keep him out of trouble. Over thepast summer, Greg had been heavily involved in selling drugs and stealingcars. His mother was unaware of these activities because Greg was livingwith his grandmother at the time, but his uncle intervened by reportinghis criminal activity to Greg’s mother. Greg responded in the way hisuncle had taught him: “I fought him . . . ’cause he was telling my motherthat I was out there doing bad stuff and I ain’t like that. I ain’t like himsnitching on me. It’s for my own good but I didn’t like that.”

Interestingly, the few experimental boys whose narratives did includedescriptions of relationships with a father figure were, with one exception,


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no longer living in low-poverty neighborhoods. For example, Bart hadmoved out to the Baltimore suburbs and then moved on to a high-povertyneighborhood in East Baltimore, not far from where his uncle lived. Barthad not attended high school regularly in the year and a half prior to theinterview since he was expelled for fighting. When we interviewed him,he had just been released from jail after being arrested for robbing some-one. Though he insisted it was a case of mistaken identity and the chargeswere dropped, his mother could not come up with the bail money, so heremained locked up for a month. In addition, Bart’s mother told us hehad been suffering emotionally from the loss of his father, a man whohad been heavily involved with Bart but had recently disappeared fromtheir lives. However, Bart regularly spent time at his uncle’s home nearby.From Bart’s description, his uncle represented a stable adult male rolemodel in his life, and Bart credited this uncle throughout the interviewas someone who taught him valuable skills, such as electronics repair—a vocation that captured Bart’s interest and motivated him to return tohigh school:

That’s why I want to go to school for [electronics repair], too. I don’t knowwhat I am touching but I just know how to do it when I look at it. I knowhow to fix a lot of stuff. The only thing I got to do is look at it. . . . Myuncle told me that [I could make a lot of money doing that]. And he taughtme, you might as well say. Now I do a lot of stuff—[points out a stereospeaker] I can make one of these!

Fifteen-year-old Frederick, a Chicago experimental, moved out to thesuburbs for three years, moved to another neighborhood for a few years,and recently moved again to a moderate poverty neighborhood. He wascurrently working at his uncle’s corner store on weekends but was stillnostalgic for his time in public housing, where he was in close proximityto any number of kin: “You know, it was the projects but it still felt likehome. I ain’t got no problems because all the people that were around,it was like my uncles and stuff. And they always looked out for me, gaveme some money when I needed it.”

In sum, we do not find distinct differences in contact with biologicalfathers that would explain the gender differences in the MTO demon-stration, but we do find substantial differences with father figures. Thecontrol boys often described the significant role uncles, and sometimesother men, played in their lives. For boys, opportunities to forge rela-tionships with father figures such as uncles were attenuated by geograph-ical and social distance. We know from previous literature that extendedkin can help mothers with monitoring and parenting, and there is someindication that a connection to a male family member is associated withless aggression and delinquency among boys (Taylor, Casten, and Flick-inger 1993; Taylor and Roberts 1995; Florsheim, Tolan, and Gorman-


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Smith 1998). In our study, the experimental boys appeared to have lostout on the potential benefits of this influence.

CONCLUSION

Neighborhood effects research offers little insight into why moving fam-ilies from high-poverty neighborhoods into lower-poverty neighborhoodsmay help to reduce risk behaviors for female adolescents but increasethem among male adolescents. As shown in previous studies, the MTOintervention had a differential impact by gender on several key outcomesfor teens, including substance use and risk behavior. These indicators allpoint to a similar pattern: low-income girls were able to take advantageof a move to a low-poverty area in a way that low-income boys were not.To develop hypotheses about what social processes may underlie thistreatment group by gender interaction, we analyzed in-depth interviewsof a subsample of Baltimore and Chicago MTO teens from experimentalfamilies who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods, as well as teens fromcontrol families.

Owing to their distinctive patterns of leisure activity (where and howthey “hang out”), boys who relocate from high-poverty to low-povertyneighborhoods seem to require more support than the extant neighbor-hood effects literature would suggest, especially when there is subsequentexposure to higher-poverty neighborhoods over time. A less delinquentcollection of possible peers, a higher degree of neighborhood collectiveefficacy, or more exposure to distal adult role models (i.e., neighbors whoset a good example) may not be sufficient to help boys avoid risk. Tonavigate their neighborhood environments, they require a set of concreteskills and survival strategies, skills and strategies that are often forged inthe face of consistent exposure to high-poverty environments in childhood.Boys who are removed from such environments during these critical yearsmay lose an important opportunity to develop such knowledge and skills.This may be beneficial for boys who remain in very low-poverty areas,but if subsequently exposed to higher-poverty and riskier neighborhoods,as was often the case with MTO, these boys may be especially vulnerable.Meanwhile, as the cultural conflict literature would predict, their penchantfor importing patterns of hanging out they learned in their origin neigh-borhoods into these lower-poverty environments, where such behavior isless normative, leads to high levels of monitoring by agents of socialcontrol and a disproportionate exposure to these neighborhoods’ delin-quents. Both factors may increase their marginalization and may lead toincreased rates of delinquency and arrest.

Girls’ differential exposure to risk behaviors and pattern of leisure


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activity (staying indoors, staying on the stoop, or leaving the neighborhoodaltogether to socialize) render such neighborhood knowledge and navi-gational skills less necessary. While girls in high-poverty urban neigh-borhoods must manage an increasingly violent landscape (see Jones 2009),on a very basic level of threat, African-American boys face much higherodds of being injured or killed than African-American girls do. Moreover,the content of the teens’ interview narratives illustrates very different riskenvironments that boys and girls in moderate and high-poverty neigh-borhoods have to negotiate. For example, researchers in the other threeMTO cities found evidence that suggests that girls in high-poverty neigh-borhoods may face a high risk of sexual harassment and even assaultthan those in low-poverty neighborhoods (Briggs et al. 2010).15 In additionto the differential risks girls and boys face, girls’ daily routines did notappear to violate norms in either high-poverty or low-poverty neighbor-hood contexts. Thus, they did not prompt negative reactions from neigh-bors or police. Nor did their style of hanging out provide any uniqueexposure to the more risky peers in these neighborhoods.

Father figures also played a role, reducing the potential benefits of anMTO move for boys relative to girls. Residing in a more proximate socialand physical space supports the familial pattern of frequent visiting andthe casual street encounters that living close by allows. For boys in par-ticular, this afforded uncles the opportunity to take their young nephewsunder their wing, to reinforce high expectations, and to offer expressionsof support and warning. In this way, these men fulfilled some of thefunctions of the neighborhood “old head,” a role some argue is disap-pearing from low-income neighborhoods (Anderson 1990). Sometimes,these men steered their young nephews away from delinquent activityand toward prosocial behaviors. More commonly, though, these men’schief function was to offer social support (“he believes in me”) and to joinin the chorus of voices cautioning male teens to stay out of trouble andmake it through high school.

It should be noted, however, that consistent exposure to high-povertyneighborhoods had left at least one harmful mark on the control boys inour study. These boys’ narratives contain vivid accounts of repeatedexposure to violence and struggles with bouts of uncontrollable anger.Another analysis of the possible sources of differential mental health out-comes for male and female teens, using these data, reveals that experi-mental boys do not appear to struggle with angry impulses in the waythat is common among control boys (Clampet-Lundquist 2010). Therefore,it could be that the advantages enjoyed by the control boys in mid ad-

15 We did not systematically ask about this in our study, and few girls in either programgroup volunteered such experiences.


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olescence relative to experimental boys might be temporary and may fadeor reverse as the longer-run manifestations of exposure to constant riskbegin to manifest themselves.

The MTO demonstration was designed with the assumption that mov-ing to a low-poverty neighborhood could benefit individuals above andbeyond what their individual or family characteristics might predict. Yetthe survey findings point to benefits to girls rather than to boys. Thoughneighborhood effects research offers few clues to this mystery, it doesprovide concepts that have proved useful in this analysis. For example,peer effects are clearly in operation, as experimental boys were less se-lective in forging friendships with neighborhood peers and more likely tointeract with seriously delinquent peers, and there is evidence that as-sociations influenced their own delinquent behavior. The salience of col-lective efficacy was evident in the experimental families’ neighborhoodsas boys, whose main forms of leisure—congregating on street corners orplaying sports in unsupervised settings—seemed to draw intense moni-toring from neighbors and police. Adult role models mattered too, butnot the neighbors down the street. Instead, those who made the differencewere the same-sex adults usually related through family or marriage, withwhom one has frequent and meaningful involvement. The MTO inter-vention appears to have limited experimental boys’ access to these po-tentially significant and protective relationships. Finally, as indicatedabove, our findings are very consistent with the small body of qualitativeliterature on what we have termed cultural conflict, as low-income boysin our study imported nondominant (Carter 2003) patterns of hanging outinto lower-poverty neighborhoods and were greeted with sharply negativereactions.

But the primary lesson to draw from these results is that boys and girlsfrom similar backgrounds—indeed, even from the same families—simplylive in different social worlds. In the face of an intervention like MTO,these underlying differences may create dramatically varied risks andopportunities. We have identified several such differences and hypothesizethat they are what led to the surprising pattern of results in youth out-comes observed in the MTO experiment. This is a critical deficit in muchof the neighborhood effects literature.

When these data were collected, many of the teenagers interviewedwere still in middle adolescence, so a fuller range of important youngadult outcomes and the social processes leading to them, such as highschool completion, teen pregnancy, incarceration, and the transition toemployment, could not be fully observed. Survey and qualitative data12–15 years after the program’s baseline are currently being collected andwill show longer-run outcomes for these young people in these importantdomains.


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APPENDIX

TABLE A1Effects on Risk Behaviors for Baltimore and Chicago Youths

Females Males

ControlMean E-C

ControlMean E-C

Male-FemaleE-C

Ever used marijuana . . . . . . . . . .299 �.130� .395 .125 .255*(.075) (.078) (.106)

Ever drank alcohol . . . . . . . . . . . . .369 �.069 .391 .127� .196�

(.076) (.073) (.103)Ever smoked cigarettes . . . . . . . .284 �.088 .270 .157* .245*

(.068) (.069) (.095)Ever been arrested . . . . . . . . . . . . .184 .025 .332 .105 .080

(.062) (.082) (.098)Problem behavior index . . . . . . .371 �.074� .315 .097* .171*

(.040) (.043) (.058)Delinquent behavior index . . . .072 .008 .132 .032 .023

(.024) (.039) (.039)Risk behavior index . . . . . . . . . . . .421 �.084� .456 .099* .193*

(.049) (.044) (.063)

Note.—E-C p experimental-control intent-to-treat estimate. Robust SEs are in paren-theses. Sample sizes for each row are 440, 441, 440, 437, 439, 440, and 441, respectively.Youths are ages 15–19 on May 31, 2001. The problem behavior index is the fraction of 11problem behaviors reported by youths: difficulty concentrating, cheating or lying, teasingothers, disobedient at home, difficulty in getting along with other children, trouble sittingstill, hot temper, would rather be alone than with others, hanging around with kids whoget into trouble, disobedient at school, and trouble getting along with teachers. The delin-quent behavior index is the fraction of 9 delinquent behaviors that youths reported everbeing engaged in: carrying a handgun, belonging to a gang, purposefully damaging ordestroying property, stealing something worth less than $50, stealing something worth $50or more, other property crimes, attacking someone with intention to hurt, selling drugs, andgetting arrested. The risk behavior index is the fraction of 4 behaviors: ever smoking mar-ijuana, ever smoking cigarettes, ever drinking alcohol, and ever having sex.

� P ! .10.* P ! .05.

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